Grass fed. The next adventure. I cowpool.

I’ve joined a cowpooling venture: with six others I’m the proud owner of the meat from a grass-fed steer that was raised without antibiotics, synthetic growth hormones, or feed animal byproducts at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos in Southern Colorado. Butchered and wrapped my share is 52 lbs., which looks surprisingly smaller than I expected it to. A lot (25 lbs.) is hamburger and stew meat, but the rest is an interesting selection of familiar and not-so familiar cuts. This exercise in good taste has necessitated the purchase of a small chest freezer that is now also stocked with Wisdom’s chicken and quite a lot of peeled green chiles.

This sounds like a lot of beef, but according to the Humane Society the average American in 2007 consumed 222 lbs. of meat, of which 66 lbs. were beef. This is up from 144 lbs./44 lbs. in 1950, which is both surprising and disturbing.

I did this for both health and sustainability reasons, and my hope is to eat less, but better, meat than before. We shall see, but mindfulness is the first step.

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on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Local Somewhere.
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One Response to “Grass fed. The next adventure. I cowpool.”

Hello! I just read your “cowpool” story and I loved it. I am the social media contact for La Cense Grass Fed Beef and was wondering if you had an email I could contact you by outside of your blog. I have a great follow up story idea that I’d love to pitch to you – about how your readers can actively participate in something “green” and be a part of the sustainable agriculture movement.

You can email me at adipalma@thebaddishgroup.com
I look very forward to hearing from you.
Great blog, by the way. I’ve enjoyed reading through it.